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Chapter 6 ~ Raking
After Detective Nelson left, Franck and Bob both felt like moping around all afternoon but were too restless. Bob grabbed a beer.
“Too early for this, but why not?” he said.
Franck went into his room and took out his banjo to practice picking patterns, and played a bit of "Oh Susanna." He thought about coming from Alabama with a banjo on his knee. Where would he go from Alabama? Maybe North Carolina. How far is that, he wondered. Could he walk the distance?
Bob set down his beer and said, “I’m going out to rake some leaves out back. I think Stella left a rake by the basement door. See you in a while.”
Franck decided to join him. They raked and raked. It was a big yard. They raked around the little half-naked bird bath lady who was always happy and smiling and raising her arms balletically to greet the birds with fresh rain water in her bowl.
They built two huge piles of leaves. Franck took a running leap and dived into the bigger one. Bob watched, amused.
“I could hide in here for a long time,” shouted Franck. “Next time the police come, you’ll find me here!” he laughed. “The Man will never find me,” he intoned in a low, commanding voice. He sneezed. Then he leaped out. “Ta-da!!”
Bob sat and watched Franck's antics until Franck sat down and tossed the rake onto the leaf pile.
"Franck," said Bob.
"Yeah?"
"Did you ever think that maybe, maybe that lady was trying to warn you? To help you out? Maybe she saw the train coming and worried about you."
"No way!" barked Franck. "Who would do that, who would sneer and say Big Boy if they wanted to help? She didn't see the train. She was just some, some bitch trying to show me who's boss."
The wind eddied through the leaves and spread some of them around again. Bob and Franck watched. No more was spoken until they were inside. They decided to order pizza.
“What is a class D crime? Or class E?” asked Franck. “Do you know? I seem to remember about Class A and B from driver’s ed. Class E must be a lot worse.”
“Yeah. I looked it up. Has to do with criminal trespassing and breaking and entering, and there’s jail time in it,” said Bob. “Don’t think about it right now. There’s a long way to go before that gets anywhere close to possible. It’s not going to do you any good to fret, you won’t be able to think clearly. How about we rent a movie? Or do you have to work tonight?”
“Not tonight; I’m doing lunch tomorrow. No waiting tables tonight. Unless I break and enter the restaurant and secretly cook up food and secretly invite people in and secretly serve them delicious dinners. Hey, how about if we get Ratatouille?”
“I thought we were going to get pizza.”
“No, I mean the movie.”
“Oh. I was hoping for Singin’in the Rain, but okay let’s get that one, whatever it is.”
So they rented Ratatouille, about the rat who was a chef, and his rat friends break into the restaurant and serve up a delicious dinner. It had absolutely nothing to do with their worries and they had a great time.
Bob went to bed early and slept like a log. Workday tomorrow.
Franck went to bed after puttering around for a while, and then he went to sleep and had a crazy dream.
He was in his car, driving on a meadow. He was dodging a herd of wild horses who were furious at him. They trapped him against a mound of grass and were about to charge him. The lead horse had red eyes and was frothing at the mouth like a mad dog. He pawed the ground like a bull about to charge. Franck swiftly backed his car up the grassy mound to get away, but when he got to the top, the mound collapsed and sucked him inside. He found himself driving down a tunnel that got darker and darker. There was a light at the end that got closer and closer and there was more and more noise, and when he arrived at the end of the tunnel, all the noise stopped. A huge company of rats was standing staring at him. An old withered lady rat stepped forward and said acidly, “At last you have come, you monster. Now we will play with you as we wish. When you leave here everything will be different.” In his dream, he knew that this was Queen Nancy Caswell and her army of rats, and when she handed him a banjo, he knew he would have to play it and dance to his own music until he dropped. And all the while he was playing and dancing, he felt like time outside in the real world was going by, way faster than normal. Backwards.
Chapter 7 ~ Registry
When Bob walked into the living room from work carrying his briefcase, he headed straight to his desk and barely noticed Franck reading at the kitchen table.
“Somebody’s got to win,” Franck said. “Why not us?”
“Huh?” Bob said, as he switched on his desk lamp, pulled papers out of his briefcase, and settled down to examine them.
“I’ll bet if you buy one of these magazines, it’ll give you an edge. A million dollars is nothing to sneeze at.”
Bob peered over at Franck. “You’re reading junk mail. You had a lousy day, didn’t you?”
“Ugh. Boring. Horrible. Hardly anyone for lunch, and no one at all after lunchtime except one guy making all kinds of demands for special favors and taking his sweet time and then he tips me a dollar. This was a hollow day, I’ll tell you. Here’s for the electric bill, sorry about that.” He handed Bob some cash.
Bob took the money quietly and laid it on his desk. He was looking at some oversized photocopies.
“Made it to the Registry today. Registry of Deeds. It’s where they keep all the land records for the city.”
“Oh, nice,” said Franck. “That must have been interesting. For you.” He kicked off his shoes and plopped into the easy chair.
“Interesting for you too, Franck. Very,” said Bob. “Come over here and look.”
With a groan, Franck heaved himself out of the cushy chair and trudged over to Bob’s desk.
“See this? It’s a map of the parsonage house property.”
“OK. So what?”
“See how the property goes all the way to the railroad track?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Where were the horses?”
Franck focused on the map. “Umm, well, here’s that barn or garage I passed, with the driveway leading to the house. The horses were back here, in the open area between these trees and the tracks.”
“Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“That’s part of the parsonage house property. It doesn’t belong to the neighbor. That Caswell can’t get you for trespassing on somebody else’s property.”
Suddenly Franck’s mind cleared up. “Oh. Right. That IS interesting. So I’m off the hook! That is amazing! Wow.”
“Right, you’re probably off the hook, if no one gets after you about collapsing that sinkhole or whatever it was. Franck, listen. Go over there and apologize to her. She can’t get you for trespassing, so there’s no harm in getting on her good side. Then she won’t want to get after you for anything.”
“No, that’s not my thing. I’m off the hook, she can’t get to me. And if I go there, she’ll probably be some wizened old lady and make me do a song and dance before she lets me go. She probably thinks she has something on me anyway. Maybe she doesn’t know about the property line. Let her forget about it, and if there’s trouble, I’ll bring up the thing about the property line and they’ll have to drop it all.”
“She won’t forget it, she was super ticked off. You terrorized her horses, remember? She’ll find some way to make you remember what you did.”
“Yeah, like I said, some kind of song and dance. Why give her the opportunity?”
“Hey, I’ll go with you. We can smooth things out. I’ll talk quietly with her. You charm her. We’ll be fine, and she’ll be happy, and it will all be over and won’t come back to haunt us.”
“I’ll think about it,” said Franck. “Wow. No Class D or Class E or anything. Better to have a classy roommate like me than to have a Class E roommate.”
“What?”
“Never mind. OK, I’ll go if you go. When?”
“It’s Veteran’s Day tomorrow, I’m off work, are you? We could go tomorrow, get it over with,” said Bob.
“I’m not working until breakfast Thursday. OK, let’s go tomorrow. Yeah, I like the getting-it-over-with part.”
Franck sank back into the easy chair, reclined it all the way back and put his arms up behind his head. “This is the life, Bob. It better be. Only one we got. Better than being bored in a nine-to-five job examining titles or something. Oops! No offense.”
“Yeah, yeah, tell me something I haven’t heard. Don’t forget, this boring title work is getting you off the hook. And there’s one more thing, Franck. There’s a cloud on this property.”
“What, it has its own raincloud, like in Li’l Abner? Did you ever see that classic comic? One little thundercloud stuck overhead and bringing on little storms and smashing bathroom windows? Yeah I could picture that.”
“No, a cloud on the title is when something was wrong with the way it was conveyed. Somebody made a mistake in selling it and after that, nobody can be sure they own it legally.”
“You mean McIver doesn’t own it legally?”
“No, I don’t know that. We’re talking a long time ago, Franck. I’d have to do a lot of research to see where things stand now. But this is an old house. Built in the 1740s. It was owned by a church in town. I had to go back to these really old books at the Registry, books with old records they still don’t have online yet. That’s why this huge copy paper; it was the only way to see the whole page. Look at this amazing handwriting. Quill pens, I guess.”
“So what’s the cloud have to do with anything?”
“Normally I hate clouds. They take time, they muddy the waters, often they don’t get sorted out very well, lots of compromises. But this one is really interesting. Maybe because the guy has my name, I don’t know.
“Look at this, Franck,” Bob continued. “The place was built in 1742, okay? Owned by the church, not by an individual. Okay. Now look here at this sale. A Josiah McIver sells the place to a Lutetia McIver in 1858 for one dollar. One dollar.”
“Wow, that’s a deal and a half. He was giving it away.”
“Yes, and guess what? It wasn’t his to sell. It belonged to the church.”
“Now why did he do that? And why did they let him? I wonder what their story was?”
“I don’t know,” said Bob, “and I wonder whether the McIvers ever really owned that property, including the fellow whose wife just died. I wonder whether that banker can really foreclose on it after all. Maybe we can get you off that…fishy steel too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Fishy steel. A hook. Let’s hope you haven’t got off one just to get caught on another.”
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